To return to our main Articles page click here.

Index to the articles on this page:
          Diet health fears   (Herald Sun newspaper, 08/01/06)
          Peers turn up heat on CSIRO diet   (The Age newspaper, 28/12/05)
          CSIRO's Total Wellbeing Diet: A diet thin on science   (The Age newspaper, 29/08/05)

Diet health fears

By Mary Papadakis

A prominant doctor and a leading nutritionist have warned Prime Minister John Howard of the possible health risks of Australia's most popular diet.

(Reproduced from the Sunday Herald Sun newspaper (Melbourne), 8 January 2006)

Health fears about The CSIRO Total Wellbeing Diet, which has sold more than half a million copies in Australia, have prompted Dr John Tickell and veteran nutritionist Dr Rosemary Stanton to appeal to Mr Howard to take action.

In letters seen by the Sunday Herald Sun, Dr Tickell and Dr Stanton warn that the diet's high meat content is in direct conflict with government dietary guidelines and can lead to an increased risk of disease, including some cancers.

Dr Tickell said this week that meat quantities in the diet -- developed by the peak government scientific research body, the CSIRO -- needed to be reviewed.

The Government's Australian Guide to Healthy Eating and the National Health and Medical Research Council recommended 65g to 100g of lean red meat be consumed three to four times a week, he said.

The Cancer Council of Australia's cancer prevention policy suggests the same amount.

But Dr Tickell said the CSIRO diet menu included about 1kg of red meat each week -- up to four times the amount suggested by fellow government bodies.

He said Mr Howard and Health Minister Tony Abbott needed to clarify the situation for Australians.

"There are warning bells ringing," Dr Tickell said.

"How can the CSIRO be serious about telling Australians to eat more and more meat."

The CSIRO's diet book remains a bestseller in Australia, with more than half a million sales and about 100,000 in New Zealand and Britain.

And there are plans to distribute the diet, recently criticised in the leading international science journal, Nature, to other parts of the globe.

In a hard-hitting editorial, Nature criticised the CSIRO for lending its hard-earned reputation to the diet, which it claims had been tested only on overweight women with a metabolic problem known as syndrome X.

"The diet is being promoted as being beneficial for everyone, whereas the published research indicates that it is superior to a high carbohydrate diet only for a sub-population of overweight women with symptoms of metabolic dysfunction," the journal's editors wrote.

Dr Stanton said the diet failed to promote plant-based protein sources.

"If they (CSIRO) are pushing a high protein diet, why don't they push chickpeas?" she asked.

"They didn't try chickpeas because there wasn't a chickpea sponsor."

Dr Tickell said the CSIRO's government link and good name were being misused in the marketing of the book.

"I feel sorry for the CSIRO because the publishers have come over the top and turned this into a huge money-making exercise."

But the wellbeing diet's co-author, Dr Manny Noakes, denied any outside influence on the diet. She said the link between red meat and bowel cancer was "infinitesimal."

She said red meat was a vital part of the low-fat, higher-protein diet and provided more iron and B12 vitamins than other sources.

Dr Stanton said claims the diet was "scientifically proven" were unjustified. "The hype doesn't match the research -- there need to be much bigger trials," she said.

"There's nothing special about it, it's ho-hum from a nutritionist point of view."

But Dr Noakes said new research showed 60 per cent of women who started the diet three years ago had managed to maintain their weight loss.

"Every time the diet is criticised we end up selling more books," she said. 

----------

Peers turn up heat on CSIRO diet

By Stephen Cauchi

(Reproduced from The Age newspaper (Melbourne), 28 December 2005)

THE internationally successful CSIRO Total Wellbeing Diet has copped a bad review from the world's most prestigious science journal, Nature.

In an editorial titled “A recipe for trouble", the journal criticises the CSIRO — Australia's publicly funded science agency — for attaching its name to the bestseller, which has already generated considerable controversy in Australia.

It says the commercial success of the book, "which knocked Harry Potter and Da Vinci Code off the national bestseller perch, is irritating some scientists, and for good reason".

The marketing of the diet as "scientifically proven" was "decidedly unsavoury", the editorial says.

"The diet is being promoted as being beneficial for everyone, whereas the published research indicates that it is superior to a high carbohydrate diet only for a sub-population of overweight women with symptoms of metabolic dysfunction."

The book has sparked arguments in Australia between dietitians over its promotion of a high-protein diet at the expense of carbohydrates.

The fact that the book was funded by the meat and livestock industry added to the controversy.

But the authors, Manny Noakes and Peter Clifton, from CSIRO Human Nutrition, insisted their research was impartial.

The editorial acknowledges the authors' defence of the book's independence but says that nevertheless, "the impression remains of a conflict of interest".

"Defenders of the book will argue that its success illustrates how to translate research into an accessible and popular format that puts science into practice. But that argument doesn't justify CSIRO giving permission for its name to be used in a way that could ultimately taint its hard-earned reputation."

The book has sold 550,000 copies in Australia and 100,000 in Britain and New Zealand. In 2006, it is expected to be translated into 13 European languages and will go on sale in the United States, Canada, India and South Africa.

Penguin books say it is the fastest-selling Australian title of all time, and probably the outright biggest local non-fiction book.

The book arose out of eight years of CSIRO research into lowering the risk of heart disease, during which it encountered the absence of scientific facts on the truth behind weight loss.

The decision to publish was not easy. "If we were going to publish a book, we would be on a shelf next to . . . really popular diets," Dr Noakes said. "We felt uncomfortable initially that we would be tarred with the same brush and it would look somewhat less than scientific."

CSIRO, which could not be contacted yesterday [27 December], has defended its decision to publish.

"The CSIRO has always published books on its scientific work and puts its name to publications and this is no exception," a spokeswoman told Nature. "The decision to publish was in response to many consumers asking for further details about the diet."

The diet's merits have been questioned. Critics include University of NSW nutritionist Rosemary Stanton and RMIT research associate Gyorgy Scrinis, who questioned why the book recommended meat-based protein over plant-based protein given "health problems associated with high meat consumption".

Overseas academics told the journal they were uncomfortable with the diet. "The hype goes beyond what the research proves," said Jim Mann, from the University of Otago.

Patrick Holford, from the British-based Institute for Optimum Nutrition, said he though the diet was dangerous in the long term, possibly resulting in higher levels of breast and prostate cancer along with stressed kidneys and reduced bone mass.

THE WELLBEING DIET

• People on a typical Western diet obtain about 15 per cent of their energy intake as protein.

• The CSIRO diet recommends doubling that to 30-35 per cent by including more meat and fish. Carbohydrate intake should be reduced, it says.

• The diet is based on research comparing two groups of women, one of which ate the CSIRO diet, the other which ate a diet involving high carbohydrate levels. The women on the CSIRO diet lost more weight than those on the "high-carb" diet.

• Critics say the research was incomplete as there was only one form of high-protein diet, involving meat. There was no comparison with a high-protein diet featuring nuts or legumes, for example.

----------

CSIRO's Total Wellbeing Diet: A diet thin on science

The CSIRO's high-meat diet is not based on a comparison with or rigorous investigation of other diets, write Gyorgy Scrinis and Rosemary Stanton.

(Reproduced from The Age newspaper (Melbourne), 29 August 2005)

The CSIRO's Total Wellbeing Diet book has been sitting atop the bestsellers list for many weeks now. The apparent popularity of this diet — if book sales are anything to go by — no doubt has a lot to do with the marketing of it as a "scientifically proven" diet that bears the respected logo of the CSIRO.

With controversy surrounding the effectiveness and long-term healthfulness of other fad weight-loss diets — such as the high-fat, low-carbohydrate Atkins diet — Australians may assume that "their" CSIRO has done the hard work and subjected the various dieting regimes on offer to some fairly rigorous, independent, long-term analysis and comparisons before coming up with their own weight-loss diet.

However, there is a disappointing gap between such expectations and the nature and findings of the research studies that actually underpin this "scientific diet".

The CSIRO diet is presented by its authors as a high-protein, low-fat, and low-kilojoule diet. The authors are careful to point out that this is a moderate-carb rather than a low-carb diet, as it contains some bread, cereal, yoghurt and fruit and does not restrict vegetables. Importantly, it is a high-meat diet, with animal-derived foods making up much of the protein content and central to the recommended meals.

The main reference cited in the book is a published research paper that reports on the results of their "major study" — conducted on 120 people for only 12 weeks and comparing just two specific diets. One group of dieters ate the researchers' preferred meat-centred, high-protein and moderate-carb diet. The portions of meat — at 100 grams for lunch and 200 grams for dinner — were high relative to the overall size of the meal. A second group — the "high-carb" group — was fed a similar diet, but some of the meat was replaced with rice or pasta.

The CSIRO study didn't rigorously compare a range of high-protein diets with a range of high-carb diets, but merely compared their high-meat diet with one contrived high-carb diet. They did not, for example, compare their meat-based, high-protein diet with a high-protein, plant-based diet, where some of the meat would be replaced with legumes or nuts.

The results of this narrowly framed and rather loaded research study was that both trial groups actually lost a statistically comparable amount of weight over 12 weeks. In a one-year follow up of 66 diabetic people who followed the CSIRO's two diets, only 38 stuck it out, and there was still no significant difference in their loss of weight or body fat. To suggest that these studies have "scientifically proven" that a high-protein diet is superior seems an exaggeration of their research findings.

As for the book's claim that the CSIRO diet reduces abdominal fat in women better than other diets — this applied only to women with high triglyceride levels. Other women and men had no greater reduction in their belly fat with the high-protein diet.

Similarly, the claim that this high-protein diet is more "satisfying" and therefore easier to maintain than the high-carb diet is also not established by their research study, which only speculates that this may be the case. It could well be that the particular high-carb diet they tested was not satisfying for reasons other than its low-protein or low-meat content, such as the blandness of the foods chosen, or because — as the researchers state — it was actually deficient in some nutrients, particularly calcium and iron.

Like most fad diets, the CSIRO diet is framed and marketed in terms of its chemical-nutrient composition, particularly in terms of the relative proportion of macro-nutrients (protein, fat, carbs). The implication is that the macro-nutrient profile tells us all we need to know about foods and diets, and that achieving some optimum ratio of these macro-nutrients will achieve specific outcomes, such as losing weight and feeling satiated.

But the macro-nutrient profile — and more generally the reduction of food to its known chemical-nutrient components — conceals as much as it reveals about food and diets. Carbs can come in the form of whole grains and legumes or in the form of refined, sugary and fatty processed foods and drinks. Similarly, protein and fats can be derived from a variety of food sources — meat or plant-derived foods, unprocessed or highly processed foods, and so on. To speak as if the food sources of these carbs, fats, proteins and calories are not important when it comes to constructing healthy, slimming and satisfying meals is to fall into an extreme nutritional reductionism.

More importantly, the focus on macro-nutrients does not directly address one of the central problems with the contemporary food supply and diet — and a major contributor to the obesity epidemic — which is the increased availability, promotion and consumption of highly processed foods and drinks over the past couple of decades.

The CSIRO diet may well "work" for those who try it, at least in the short term, if the aim is simply to lose weight. There's no mystery to this. Any diet that recommends a kilojoule-restricted food intake is going to "work", at least for a while. There are no great scientific breakthroughs at work here, just a bit of dietary common sense.

The real challenge is to maintain a good body weight over the long term, by adopting a health-giving, tasty, affordable and ecologically sound diet. This can, arguably, be best achieved by eating a diet centred on unprocessed, plant-derived wholefoods — wholegrains, legumes, nuts, fruits and vegetables. Incorporating adequate levels of physical exercise is equally important.

The CSIRO's research was partly funded by Meat and Livestock Australia and Dairy Australia. So it is no surprise that the sponsors' products figure so highly in the recommended meals and weekly meal plans: beef, lamb and dairy products. The CSIRO's endorsement of a high-meat diet is perhaps an indication of the extent to which our scientists have taken on the role of consultants to industry in their bid to raise money, and their willingness to deliver research findings that industry finds agreeable.

How responsible is it, though, to be recommending such a high-meat diet in the context of concerns over the ecological sustainability and health problems associated with high meat consumption?

(Dr Rosemary Stanton is a nutritionist. Dr Gyorgy Scrinis is a research associate at the Globalism Institute, RMIT.)

To return to our main Articles page click here.